I must admit, I find that astonishing. Not that the average person on the street wouldn’t have heard of them, but that someone online enough to be having these sorts of conversations wouldn’t have.
Are you familiar with CollegeHumor, perhaps? After their corporate owners got screwed around by Facebook’s pivot to video (and the fraudulent data involved), they were going to shut down CH entirely until the head of the creative group reached an agreement to buy it out, and under his ownership he created the private streaming service Dropout. Today it’s mostly entirely private, with promotional content like the occasional episode or clips uploaded as Shorts put onto YouTube.
Nebula got its start as a sort of multi-channel network owned by and for YouTube creators, to avoid many of the big pitfalls that MCNs became known for. Its earliest more well-known members are Sam from Wendover/Half As Interesting, Brian from Real Engineering, Colin from CGP Grey, and Philip from Kursgesagt. The latter two later left over “creative differences” (leaks have seemed to imply, basically, that they wanted to keep it a small elite group at the core which could profit from increased growth while adding more creators, while the rest of the people then involved wanted a more equitable arrangement). It’s since grown to way too many channels to name, but if you’re interested you can see the full list here. A few choice selections might include tech reporter TechAltar (whose recent “1 month without US tech giants” and the Nebula Plus follow-up “Which alternatives am I sticking with?” video are reminiscent of the one this thread is about), astrophysicist Angela Collier, Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough, history & video game design analysis channels Extra History & Extra Credits, TLDR News, human geography (with a focus on conflicts) from RealLifeLore. Linus from LTT has talked about Nebula once or twice, though his commentary on it gets wildly wrong, claiming it was a sort of pump & dump scheme where the main goal was to sell to private equity or something, seemingly because he’s projecting his own techbro capitalist attitude onto them. As I sort of mentioned above, Nebula basically serves as an uber-patreon. You pay a single subscription fee (when I signed up it was $30 per year, but it may have changed) to get mostly content that could be gotten for free (but with ads) on YouTube, plus some bonus content, some stuff a bit earlier, and a few Nebula Originals. Lindsay Ellis might be the most notable one there. Since getting harassed off the Internet by Twitter, all her videos have been Nebula Originals apart from 2 promoting her new book.
Neither of these are really meant to be a complete YouTube replacement, but rather a way for them to create more control over their stuff and get the stability of knowing they aren’t relying on the fickle YouTube algorithm (and the whims of YouTube censorship).
FWIW the specific channels I recommended were mostly based on stalking your user profile and grabbing a couple I thought might interest you based on that. But I didn’t have much to go on from your Lemmy history specifically. They weren’t necessarily the first ones I’d recommend to someone in the general public, or to someone whose interests I knew better.
if only I could figure out how to use peertube
From my experience trying Peertube, its biggest problem for now is just…the server infrastructure of existing instances isn’t very good. I got really bad buffering. Maybe better server-side encoding could have helped with that. Maybe they need stronger server hardware with better outbound network connections. Maybe I just need to find a more locally-hosted instance to me. Maybe it’s something else. But the user experience was really not good. Which is a shame. As nice as Nebula’s sort of worker-owned co-op model is, true federated video would be really nice for those of us not privileged enough to become a member of the exclusive club. YouTube being basically the only real option really sucks, and I’m sick of alternative options like Gfycat dying off and losing all their content.
I must admit, I find that astonishing. Not that the average person on the street wouldn’t have heard of them, but that someone online enough to be having these sorts of conversations wouldn’t have.
Are you familiar with CollegeHumor, perhaps? After their corporate owners got screwed around by Facebook’s pivot to video (and the fraudulent data involved), they were going to shut down CH entirely until the head of the creative group reached an agreement to buy it out, and under his ownership he created the private streaming service Dropout. Today it’s mostly entirely private, with promotional content like the occasional episode or clips uploaded as Shorts put onto YouTube.
Nebula got its start as a sort of multi-channel network owned by and for YouTube creators, to avoid many of the big pitfalls that MCNs became known for. Its earliest more well-known members are Sam from Wendover/Half As Interesting, Brian from Real Engineering, Colin from CGP Grey, and Philip from Kursgesagt. The latter two later left over “creative differences” (leaks have seemed to imply, basically, that they wanted to keep it a small elite group at the core which could profit from increased growth while adding more creators, while the rest of the people then involved wanted a more equitable arrangement). It’s since grown to way too many channels to name, but if you’re interested you can see the full list here. A few choice selections might include tech reporter TechAltar (whose recent “1 month without US tech giants” and the Nebula Plus follow-up “Which alternatives am I sticking with?” video are reminiscent of the one this thread is about), astrophysicist Angela Collier, Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough, history & video game design analysis channels Extra History & Extra Credits, TLDR News, human geography (with a focus on conflicts) from RealLifeLore. Linus from LTT has talked about Nebula once or twice, though his commentary on it gets wildly wrong, claiming it was a sort of pump & dump scheme where the main goal was to sell to private equity or something, seemingly because he’s projecting his own techbro capitalist attitude onto them. As I sort of mentioned above, Nebula basically serves as an uber-patreon. You pay a single subscription fee (when I signed up it was $30 per year, but it may have changed) to get mostly content that could be gotten for free (but with ads) on YouTube, plus some bonus content, some stuff a bit earlier, and a few Nebula Originals. Lindsay Ellis might be the most notable one there. Since getting harassed off the Internet by Twitter, all her videos have been Nebula Originals apart from 2 promoting her new book.
Neither of these are really meant to be a complete YouTube replacement, but rather a way for them to create more control over their stuff and get the stability of knowing they aren’t relying on the fickle YouTube algorithm (and the whims of YouTube censorship).
Thank you, I will check these out!
If anything came from this conversation, then at least one more pair of eyes is away from yt.
Now if only I could figure out how to use peertube…
FWIW the specific channels I recommended were mostly based on stalking your user profile and grabbing a couple I thought might interest you based on that. But I didn’t have much to go on from your Lemmy history specifically. They weren’t necessarily the first ones I’d recommend to someone in the general public, or to someone whose interests I knew better.
From my experience trying Peertube, its biggest problem for now is just…the server infrastructure of existing instances isn’t very good. I got really bad buffering. Maybe better server-side encoding could have helped with that. Maybe they need stronger server hardware with better outbound network connections. Maybe I just need to find a more locally-hosted instance to me. Maybe it’s something else. But the user experience was really not good. Which is a shame. As nice as Nebula’s sort of worker-owned co-op model is, true federated video would be really nice for those of us not privileged enough to become a member of the exclusive club. YouTube being basically the only real option really sucks, and I’m sick of alternative options like Gfycat dying off and losing all their content.